by geoffda » Thu Nov 06, 2014 6:31 pm
"I come from a ski racing background, so technically, I can do anything on skis..." ~ Jeremy Nobis, standing at the top of a 55 degree pitch in Chamonix.
In PMTS we teach carving. The problem is that most people don't truly understand what we mean by the word "carving." Unfortunately, it is a difficult concept to fully grasp until you can actually do it. If you understand what we mean by it, you will recognize that the process of learning how to control the ski to make it actually carve teaches you everything you need to know about ski technique. When you can truly carve, you create so much extra rotation that you have to explicitly use movements to manage, minimize or counteract it. As you learn how to do that, you also begin to understand how you can unleash all of those forces if you need to. This is what people who think that "rotary" is a skill don't get. Ironically, the best way to learn "rotary" isn't to do pivot slips, it is to learn how to carve at the highest levels. However, in order to learn how to actually carve at those levels, you have to first learn how to ski without throwing in active rotation.
So to answer your question, you don't really reconcile carving with pedal hops, but if you can carve at a very high level there is no need. To start with, anybody that can carve at high levels should have no difficulty with pedal hops. There might be a few exceptions, but those are going to be due to physical limitations. That said, when you watch skiers who came from a high level race background do pedal hops, they look different. Those skiers have the body awareness that they developed from learning to carve which allows them to minimize effort and maintain balance. You will generally see aggressive retraction rather than a pronounced extension to push off. You will often see them pre-load their bodies in a countered (anticipated) position so that when they pedal, the skis twist across due to the unwinding of their hips. They will balance better and you will see aggressive counterbalance occurring when the skis touch snow. You may even see some tipping occurring when the skis are in the air. All in all, from the perspective of body movements, they won't generally look all that different from when they are ripping regular turns.
The other thing to keep in mind is that carving on extreme slopes of 50 degrees or more is well within the realm of what elite skiers can do and they will use the movements that PMTS teaches to do it. And I'm not just talking about powder runs in Alaska. The pitch Jeremy Nobis skied that I'm referring to was chalky. Somewhere on this forum there is an article from a renowned ski mountaineer talking about carving turns down the Sky Ladder, which is a classic ice climb on Mount Andromeda. He correctly points out that carved turns are far safer on steep, icy pitches because you don't load the ski all at once and risk losing your edges. While carving extreme terrain requires a very high level of skill, I don't believe that it is outside the realm of what a sufficiently motivated and trained "average" skier could accomplish.
That isn't to say that you should never do pedal hops. Some may want to access steep terrain despite not being skilled enough to be able to carve turns there. Some places are simply too narrow to carve a turn. Nothing wrong with that. However, for those that never learned to carve in the first place, it is important to understand that spending too much time with pedal hops can make it difficult to learn how to carve on any pitch. Once rotation becomes an ingrained movement pattern, it will likely impede further skiing development.